Amber Carpenter on Animals in Indian Philosophy, History of Philosophy, 21 January 2018

History of Philosophy, a podcast series supported by the Philosophy department in King’s College and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, carried an interview with Yale-NUS Associate Professor of Humanities (Philosophy) Amber Carpenter on the status of nonhuman animals in ancient Indian philosophy and literature. She noted that there was a vast corpus of animal fables in classical Indian literature, frequently depicted as social beings, models of right conduct or incorporated within the divine realm. While animals were pervasive in Indian literature, there was comparatively little active engagement with the question of animals in Indian philosophical thought. However, these animal fables had been shared and reworked as part of everyday discourse, so there was a high receptivity to nonhuman animal interactions in ancient Indian philosophy and literature.